Trump DOJ's sentencing of Michael Cohen could come back to haunt ex-president: expert
The Justice Department's targeting of Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has long been debated, as the so-called "fixer" maintains that all of his actions were in service to someone else who was not sent to federal prison for the crimes.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann walked through the things in Trump's past that will impact his sentencing.
"It will be quite the sort of listing of all of the factors that make this crime and make this defendant serious," he continued. Among those things is the "precedent." That includes what kind of sentencing has been done in other cases that can be compared to Trump's. The one who is closest to Trump, however, is Michael Cohen.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018. In the years since, he's requested all government documents in which staff discussed his case to uncover what was happening behind the scenes, purportedly to target him on behalf of Trump. Cohen's most recent book details how he believes Trump used the DOJ against him to try and silence him, and the crusade for documents is to prove it definitively.
Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the DOJ refused to cooperate until Cohen won his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. However, Cohen told Raw Story earlier this year that none of the documents had been sent. It has been over a year.
Weissmann explained that the Trump DOJ's actions will now come back to haunt Trump.
Speaking to MSNBC Friday, he said that based on what they watched in Judge Juan Merchan's courtroom they can anticipate what he'll be thinking about in calculating a sentence.
There has already been a person who participated in the conspiracy who has gone to prison for this and served three years, he pointed out.
"And that person, which is Michael Cohen, pled guilty and cooperated," he explained. "Those things give you a lesser sentence. I think when you think about that, and is he being treated comparably? I think the Michael Cohen situation is going to weigh heavily, and it will also be something that there will be increased attention because the political side of this will see two very different submissions."
Weissmann said that comparing Cohen to Trump is going to be difficult to explain to the public if Trump gets a lesser sentence than the man who cooperated with prosecutors.
"How do you explain to the public why somebody who is more culpable, far more culpable for whom the crime was done and solicited all sorts of people?" he asked. "How do you explain why the leader doesn't go to jail? And then, let's say, would you take the same position? Let's assume the January 6th case went to trial, and he was found guilty of that, and hundreds of people are in jail; does he not go to jail?"
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